Ensuring food safety during Lunar New Year and spring festival season

The 2017 Lunar New Year (Tet) and the spring festival season are coming, entailing concerns over food safety issues as this will be the time seeing the most consumption of food commodities in the year, particularly meat, fish, eggs, candies, wine, beer and soft drinks.

Aiming to ensure safe food for people during the Tet holiday, the Central Intersectoral Steering Committee on Food Safety has issued a plan to implement its tasks in the upcoming Lunar New Year and spring festival season. Accordingly, at the central level, the steering committee will set up six intersectoral inspection teams with the involvement of the Ministries of Health, Agriculture and Rural Development, Industry and Trade, Science and Technology, and Public Security, and other departments and agencies.

The delegations will carry out inspection work in 12 cities and provinces, namely Hanoi, Bac Ninh, Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Phuoc, Khanh Hoa, Ninh Thuan, Phu Tho, Tuyen Quang, An Giang, Dong Thap, Gia Lai and Kon Tum. At the same time, cities, provinces, districts and communes will establish inspection teams of their own to scrutinise the situation of food hygiene and safety in their localities during the period.

The inspections are aimed at evaluating State management over food safety from provincial to communal level, as well as the observance of regulations on ensuring food safety among producers and traders of food and catering services, thereby preventing and handling violation cases in a timely fashion, minimising the number of food poisoning cases and food-borne diseases, and introducing measures to enhance the validity and effectiveness of State management in this field.

In addition to their upholding a high sense of responsibility with consumers and building and protecting their trademarks, food producers, traders and processors need to seriously observe regulations on food safety via constantly supervising the food processing, transporting and preserving procedures and improving knowledge for employees in food processing and preservation.

Local authorities are responsible for working closely with the health sector to boost communication about food safety and guide the selection, purchasing, processing, preservation and consumption of safe food; promoting the importance of the observance of hygiene regulations in preventing the risk of food pollution and food-borne diseases; and informing people of the food producing, trading and processing institutions violating food safety regulations via mass media so that people will be able to avoid low-quality food.

With the strong engagement of ministries, sectors all all-level People’s Committees, the active participation of people in fighting food safety violations and the high sense of responsibility with consumers upheld by food producing, processing and trading institutions, there is a strong belief that people will be able to welcome the 2017 Lunar New Year and spring festival season without fears about food safety issues.

VOV